The Lost Don
When FBI agents showed up last spring to arrest the Chicago mob boss Joey “The Clown” Lombardo, there was a problem: he wasn't there, and he hasn't been seen since. But Lombardo is more than a vanishing act. He's one of a vanishing breed—a last link to the Chicago Outfit's blood-spattered heyday.
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While he may be known as "The Clown" in the press, Lombardo's nickname on the streets is "Lumpy"-"because he was so good at pounding lumps on people's heads," says Richard Lindberg, a Chicago author and historian. Lombardo has also used a number of aliases, including Joe Padula and Joe Cuneo. But his given name is Giuseppe Lombardi, one of 11 children born to Mike and Carmela Lombardi.
The Lombardis emigrated from Bari, Italy. Like most Italian immigrants to Chicago at the time, they settled on the Near West Side, where Mike worked as a butcher, according to Giuseppe's birth certificate. "Mama and Papa were ‘old country,'" says Jack O'Rourke, a former Chicago FBI agent who is now a private investigator. "And dirt poor."
Joey Lombardo once told police he committed his first theft when he was 18 so his mother could get an operation. But it's likely that Lombardo, a high-school dropout, began his wayward life at an earlier age, growing up in the same Grand-Ogden area as Tony Spilotro and Tony Accardo's Circus Café Gang.
In 1951, Lombardo married Marion Nigro in a Catholic ceremony at the Holy Rosary Church, at 612 North Western Avenue. Nigro already lived in the two-story brick building on West Ohio Street that has become so familiar as Lombardo's home. Joey moved in, and the couple never moved out, while raising their two kids, Joseph Jr. and Joanne. (Property records show that Marion and Joanne now co-own the building.)
By the time he was 25, which would have been 1954, Lombardo owned a construction company, according to his lawyer, Rick Halprin. Indeed, Chicago Crime Commission documents describe Lombardo as a partner in Lombardo Bros. Construction at one point. He is also variously described over the years as a partner in several other construction companies; owner of the Lombardo Trucking Co. (address: 2210 West Ohio); a worker for a hot dog stand manufacturer; and the holder of hidden interests in real estate and restaurants. Lombardo started racking up a series of burglary and loitering arrests in 1954, according to Chicago Crime Commission files. (In each case he avoided conviction.)
In 1963, Lombardo first started showing up in the detailed annual reports compiled by Virgil Peterson, then the crime commission president. Chicago police had charged Lombardo and five others, including future mob bigwig John "No Nose" DiFronzo, in connection with an alleged West Side loansharking ring. The case centered on a factory worker who owed $2,000 and was behind on his payments. Lombardo and his pals allegedly tied the deadbeat to a beam in the basement of a bar called Mr. Lucky's Tavern and beat him "unmercifully" until he lost consciousness, according to Peterson's account. On the witness stand, however, the factory worker couldn't positively identify Lombardo, who was immediately dismissed from the case-his 11th acquittal in 11 arrests. The other defendants also won acquittals.
By the end of the 1960s, Lombardo's work for the mob covered virtually every one of its specialties, according to law enforcement allegations: loansharking, gambling, porn, and even a ring dealing in stolen furs that operated at four Midwestern airports, including O'Hare, and had the participants wearing coveralls to pose as airport workers. "He was a well-rounded crook," says Jim Wagner. And Lombardo was attending the weddings and wakes of mob members, according to a contemporary Chicago Crime Commission memo. The newspapers started calling Lombardo an "up-and-comer."
In 1967, the mob held one of the premier public social events of its history, a swanky party at the famously pink Edgewater Beach Hotel honoring the West Side overlord Fiore "Fifi" Buccieri. The 1,000-strong guest list included 200 "important crime syndicate hoodlums," according to Peterson. At least a handful of unabashed pols attended, too. The crooner Vic Damone and a 20-piece band provided the entertainment. The Chicago police called it "the largest assemblage of mobsters ever staged in Chicago."
Lombardo, of course, was there.
The story of Las Vegas still astonishes after all these years. Who would have imagined that gigantic and gaudy casinos would bloom in the desert, and that the descendants of Al Capone's Chicago mob would be there to cash in? That they would use the pension fund of a union for truck drivers, taxi drivers, and warehousemen-the Teamsters-to finance their schemes? And then coordinate couriers crisscrossing the country with suitcases of cash every week, delivering the "skim" to all the mob bosses who had a piece of the action?
In 1971, Tony Accardo sent Tony Spilotro to join Spilotro's childhood friend Frank Rosenthal to run the Outfit's operations there. As revealed by the FBI's investigations and portrayed in numerous accounts, Spilotro acted as Mr. Outside, the street muscle who did the dirty work to keep everyone in line. (Bill Roemer titled his book about Spilotro The Enforcer.) Rosenthal acted as Mr. Inside, the brilliant innovator who took the sports book off the street and put it in the casino. Rosenthal not-so-secretly operated the largest casinos in town, including his home base, the mobbed-up Stardust.
Back in Chicago, Lombardo had proved himself as a dependable moneymaker with sharp business instincts. (FBI agents listening to wiretaps would later be surprised to hear how knowledgeably Lombardo spoke about the stories he read in The Wall Street Journal.) He did a stellar job as Grand Avenue capo and seemed ready for a promotion. By many accounts, Accardo tapped Lombardo to oversee Spilotro and Rosenthal; they would report to him.
Accardo also made Lombardo the Outfit's liaison to organized labor, and in particular to Allen Dorfman, the Chicago insurance executive who managed the Teamsters' pension fund. Dorfman was a legacy: his father, Paul, had introduced the Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa Sr. to the mob. Dorfman was essentially the mob's loan officer-the mob couldn't exactly go to a bank to get financing to build or acquire new casinos. He, too, would report to Lombardo.
From here on out, Lombardo's fate would be inextricably bound up with the performance of Spilotro, Rosenthal, and Dorfman. He would also be fortunate to remain out of the spotlight as the exploits of his new crew spread. "A Machiavellian figure in the back of things," says Richard Lindberg.
The job got a little easier in 1976, when New Jersey voters passed a referendum to allow gambling in Atlantic City. Before that, the ruling body of the mob nationally, "The Commission," considered Las Vegas open territory. After New Jersey legalized gambling, The Commission gave Chicago the exclusive rights to Las Vegas in exchange for securing Atlantic City for the East Coast mobs.
It was a coup for Chicago, a reverse Brock-for-Broglio. But it's no secret how things turned out. "These people had paradise all to themselves," Scorsese later said, "and blew it."
For a while, though, every-thing clicked-not only in Vegas but in Chicago. Problems had a way of disappearing. In 1974, for example, the U.S. attorney here charged Lombardo, Spilotro, and Dorfman, among others, in a fraud scheme involving a $1.4-million pension fund loan to the American Pail Company, a sham enterprise unwittingly fronted, in part, by Daniel Seifert, a 29-year-old Elk Grove Village businessman. The FBI suspected that Lombardo and his pals were more interested in using the loan to line their pockets than to make pails. Word of Seifert's cooperation with the federal probe leaked out, leading Lombardo to ask Accardo for permission to eliminate him, according to Bill Roemer's 1995 book Accardo: The Genuine Godfather.
Despite Accardo's professed aversion to killing private citizens, he told Lombardo to "take him out," according to Roemer.
At 8 a.m. one fall day, four masked gunmen shot Seifert dead in front of his wife and child as they were about to enter a Bensenville factory he owned. Both Roemer and an FBI informant have named Lombardo as one of the triggermen. In their indictment last spring, prosecutors linked Lombardo to the murder for the first time. (Rick Halprin says Lombardo was in a police station reporting a stolen wallet at the time of the murder.)
By Roemer's account, Accardo was furious that Seifert had been killed in front of his family. Such a cold-blooded hit was bound to bring heightened police and media scrutiny. "[Accardo] could understand that Tony Spilotro would stoop to such stupidity," Roemer wrote. "But Accardo had a hard time reconciling that Joe Lombardo, a much sharper guy than Spilotro, could be so stupid."
Nonetheless, Seifert's murder was "an absolute disaster" for the prosecution in the loan-fraud case, says Peter Wacks, one of the lead agents in the matter. Without Seifert's testimony, the prosecution fell apart and all hands were acquitted.
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